Bootlegger’s Daughter

7 changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes

I was in early on Monday morning and already into my second cup of coffee by the time Sherry and the clerks arrived at the office. They were willing to talk about their weekend if I was interested, but when I mumbled around my jelly doughnut that I hadn’t had a chance to read the newspapers since Friday, they left me to get on with them.

The biweekly Dobbs Ledger is owned by a family with unabashedly liberal leanings, and Linsey Thomas, its current editor and publisher, had come out for Luther Parker the week before, citing the need for more minorities on the bench. I suppose white women do hold a narrow margin over black men and Parker would have been my choice, too, if I weren’t running. But I was, and it hurt my feelings not to have my own hometown paper endorse me. On the other hand, Friday’s letters-to-the-editor columns had carried several letters written in my support and they’d positioned my ad-Deborah Knott for District Court Judge… isn’t it time?-very nicely, just above the fold on the obituary page.

People here usually turn to the deaths before the engagements and weddings, so that’s the most read page in the paper.

Doesn’t matter whether the deceased are stillborns or pushing a hundred. If somebody has a local connection, the Ledger will list parents (and sometimes both sets of grandparents) even if they’ve been dead fifty or sixty years, followed by the names of all immediate survivors, cause of death, and what the deceased did for a living. Each obituary concludes with the name of the funeral home, visiting hours, what church, who’s preaching the funeral, and where the body’s to be interred. No mistaking one Willie Johnson for another by the time the Ledger gets finished. My picture was small, but I thought it conveyed competence without grimness. I also hoped that the contrast to all those sober suits and short male haircuts in the other ads would add subliminal appeal, remind the electorate that they might need a judge with a woman’s tender heart sometime.

John Claude arrived at his regular time and acted surprised to find me there on the sunporch already leafing through the newspapers. Usually he’s the first one in after Sherry and, despite pro forma grumbling about Reid and me wandering in at all hours, he prefers it that way. Gives him a chance to drink his coffee in peace. Sherry knows better than to let the clerks disturb him. Not that he’d be rude to them-John Claude is seldom rude to anyone-but pained shadows do cross his thin patrician face; and while Sherry never notices my exasperated sighs, she’s alert to John Claude’s every nuance. Must be fun being a man in a Southern town.

The pained shadows fought with pleasantries as he saw the shambles I’d made of the paper. (Okay, so I notice nuances, too. But I’m older than Sherry. My generation was raised to notice. Doesn’t mean I still react with an automatic “I’m sorry” or “Let me take care of whatever’s bothering your little ol’ manly sense of rightness” the way she does.)

Monday morning’s big “local” story was yet another drug deal gone wrong over the weekend, this one down at Fort Bragg: shotguns, three dead, no arrests yet. The N amp;O’s editorial page carried endorsements for most of the major candidates. They did not reach down as far as outlying judgeships, and I’d already moved on to the sports section, where the owner of the Durham Bulls was still shaking his minor league monopoly over Raleigh ’s dreams of getting its own team.

“I’m finished with the front part, if you want it,” I said, cheerfully handing it over.

“Is that jam?” he fretted as he tried to restore the virgin alignment of each sheet only to be foiled by a sticky smear on the op ed page. A very small smear, I might add, and one I’d wiped away so carefully that any normal person would never have noticed.

“You mean to tell me Julia still hasn’t finished redoing y’all’s breakfast room?” I asked.

“Touché.” He looked contrite. “Forgive my shortness, Deborah. You’re quite right. I shouldn’t allow disorder at home to affect relations here.”

I groaned at the mild pun, and my cousin smiled with restored good humor. He saw the feature section of Friday’s Ledger still face up at the end of the table and said, “That’s a nice picture of you.”

Despite fulsome campaign ads on every other page, the paper had used its Focus page for a here’s-who’s-running look at all the local primary candidates: age, education background, work experience. There wasn’t enough room on the page for everyone’s picture, so only the candidates for district court judgeships, clerk of the court, and county commissioners got to have their shining faces published. For the first time it dawned on me that those were also the only three races with serious black candidates-Linsey Thomas’s subtle way of alerting blacks and liberals to the potentials for racial balance?

“I was right surprised to see Talbert’s letter,” John Claude said as he poured himself a cup of coffee and added a precise tablespoon of half-and-half from the refrigerator.

“What’s to be surprised about?” I asked, shifting all the papers over to make room for him at the end of the table. “G. Hooks writes a letter every year supporting Jesse.”

“Not G. Hook’s letter in yesterday’s News and Observer. I meant Gray Hook’s letter in Friday’s Ledger.”

“Oh, yeah. That sort of surprised me, too,” I admitted. “You reckon he and his daddy had another fight or something?”

Grayson Hooks Talbert-everyone called him G. Hooks-is one of the movers and shakers of the state’s Republican Party, a man so far to the right that he almost makes Jesse Helms look liberal. Chairman of the board and major stockholder of Talbert International, a pharmaceutical company of global proportions, he also sits on the boards of several major corporations that have profitable ties to government. Talberts always had money, but the Reagan-Bush years have been particularly good to G. Hooks, and his country estate on the Durham side of the Research Triangle now boasts its own private airstrip and two Lear jets.

All that jetting off to open new markets out on the Pacific rim was probably how a relatively moderate Republican had slipped into the lovely old Victorian governor’s mansion back here in North Carolina. Not that G. Hooks hadn’t contributed heavily to James Hardison’s election two years ago. It must have been like sucking lemons though, since the antediluvian Democrat who’d tried to pull an upset was probably closer to him philosophically than Governor Jim Hardison would ever be.

He had two sons: Gray-short for Grayson Hooks Talbert, Junior-and Victor. As near as I could tell, listening to gossip and reading between the fine lines of newsprint, the younger son had emerged from the womb with G. Hooks’s single-minded devotion to business. A dutiful ant who ran their New York office while shuttling back and forth to Capitol Hill, Victor Talbert had graduated with a Wharton MBA, married a Harvard Law whiz, and appeared quite happy to stay out of the South.

Gray, on the other hand, started off a happy-go-lucky grasshopper. Flunked out of Carolina, U VA, and the Citadel, smashed up two Porsches and a Jag before he was twenty. Without getting into a heavy nature/nurture debate, you have to wonder about the psychological damage you can do if you name your first son Junior and then don’t add Senior to your own name. To give him credit though, G. Hooks hung in and kept trying to find a proper niche for his namesake. After all, Talbert Pharmaceuticals was a huge empire, surely there was some little duchy where the princeling couldn’t screw up?

Evidently not.

Nobody knew what the final straw was-a television reporter once told me that G. Hooks had on retainer at that time a full-fledged personal publicist whose sole mission in life was to keep Gray’s name out of the papers and his face off the TV screens-but the upshot was the equivalent of being told to go sit in the corner and keep his mouth shut or plan on sweeping floors or begging on street corners the rest of his natural life.

The corner he was sent to happened to be a farmed-out piece of Colleton County dirt that joined my daddy’s land at the edge of Cotton Grove Township. G. Hooks had inherited it through his mother’s side, then never bothered to do anything with it beyond listing it for a tax loss. (Daddy’d once offered to buy it-Daddy’s like the USSR before Glasnost: always looking to put another buffer zone between him and the rest of the world-but G. Hooks had drawn himself up all righteous-like and sent word through his local manager that he didn’t deal with bootleggers.)

To everyone’s surprise, young Gray turned out to be a real farmer. Oh, there were a couple of rough years at first when he tore up the roads with his silver turbo Carrera. Some of the wild crowd followed him into exile, and there were weeklong brawls out at the farm and messy aftermaths-I represented one of the local women in her paternity suit and got her a decent settlement-but eventually things settled down. Gray settled down, too. Guess he had to. Daddy said that every time the sheriff got called out, G. Hooks would halve his allowance.

(Don’t ask me how Daddy knows that. He just does. But then he’s always kept tabs on everything that goes on around his part of the county. He may not’ve ever studied Francis Bacon, but he sure does subscribe to Bacon’s tenet that knowledge is power.)

Before Gray Talbert got his act together, he was down to ten dollars a week. A thirty-year-old playboy can’t raise much hell on that, so the rowdies quit coming around. Daddy says at that point it was probably a combination of boredom and farm genes kicking in. Whatever, Gray took to messing around in one of the old greenhouses back of the house. Then he signed up for some horticulture classes at Colleton Community College and next thing you know, he’s started himself a little nursery business. That was eight years ago, and the single dilapidated greenhouse has expanded into at least a dozen sprawled around under the pines out there. He soon got out of the retail end and just does wholesale. I have the impression that he roots liner shrubs, mostly azaleas and boxwoods, things that don’t take a lot of intensive labor.

Like everything else Talberts touch, there must be pretty good money in wholesale shrubbery because he still drives a Porsche, although more sedately these days, in keeping with the low profile he’s maintained since buckling down to business. Unlike his father, Gray’s never involved himself in politics. If I’d been asked, I’d have said that along with G. Hooks’s work ethics, Gray has probably grown into a similarly conservative mindset as he nears forty. That’s what made it so surprising that he’d write a letter to the Ledger supporting me.

“Maybe he’s just being neighborly to Kezzie,” said John Claude. “Your daddy’s been helpful about providing Talbert with people who’ll work steady.”

“Maybe he’s sweet on you,” said Sherry, who’d come in on the tail end of our conversation. Never mind that Gray Talbert and I have hardly ever even spoken to each other. Sherry’s always on the lookout for potential romance.

At which point, there was a click of high heels on the stairway and we caught a flash of honey blonde hair and the rear view of a shapely female form as it sped though the wide reception hall, past Sherry’s desk, and out the front door. Then Reid followed, knotting his tie, his jacket slung over one arm.

“Y’all leave me any coffee?” he drawled, enjoying it that none of us had realized he’d spent the night upstairs again.

The pained shadow returned to John Claude’s face.